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Arjuna gushing

I've never seen the anime, because based on reviews and a few YouTube snippets, I expect it would be disappointing. Besides, there is no possible way it can live up to the score Yoko Kanno composed for it.

In fact, I'm guessing she composed it without even seeing the series herself, or even the storyboards. Perhaps a summary of the plot. Half the compositions are too colorful and driven to act as background to anything but a straight-up music video, or a silent film written specifically for the songs. They certainly don't belong in a belabored, inconstant anime TV series, where they get chopped up in indifferently edited scenes or stuffed into the background of turgid dialogue.

Of the half-dozen standouts, one song in particular has just leapt into my ears from the iPod on random play. It's track 13, "Prophet". When the timpani rolls out about halfway through the song, all the hairs on the back of my scalp stand up and tingle, and I can't help but think of a huge sunlit earth spread out before me as I'm falling through the sky. That imagery is the kind of thing this whole album inspires. (Well, to be honest, I shy away from the vocal tracks and prefer the instrumentals.)